Normal adults have a remarkable capacity for face recognition. Each of us stores mental representations of thousands of faces and readily encodes new ones. The research proposed concerns: (a) the nature of those mental representations; (b) developmental changes in the nature of those representations; (c) the question of whether those developmental changes reflect acquisition of domain-specific knowledge of faces, per se, or more domain-general changes in pattern encoding and memorial skills; (d) the question of a possible maturational contribution to the development of face encoding skills.